Just wanted to post some older stuff, because I feel bad for not posting every week. I really want to have more time to shoot more, that’s why I applied for a position at the Chico State’s paper, The Orion. This semester is just too busy. Maybe spring 07 will be better.

This is Chris. He traveled all the way to San Diego from Chicago in a couple of old cars to make a new life for himself. Not knowing anyone, Chris and his band mates lived out of tents and cars for months, all the while holding down jobs and small gigs.

He now attends Chico State University, and swears that he would rather be a bum in California then live through another winter in the Midwest. So he took a chance and made it to college. No longer in the same band, he is pursuing a musical career, in production most likely.

There they are, stealing another keg from students. bastards. The thing I questioned the police about when I shadowed them for a night was about the crime rate. The IV Foot Partol(Isla Vista) tried to explain to me that the main problem with crime around the UCSB student area were mostly alcohol related.

I disagreed.

During the late 1980’s and early to mid 1990’s, UCSB, along with other major party schools were seen as out of control. Student deaths, rape, lower grades and bad reputations were severely hurting these major institutions, especially the state and federally funded schools. So, in an effort to increase competitive enrollment, as well as re-establish themselves as prestigious learning institutions, they implemented a well funded crackdown on “binge drinking.”

There are only two schools in the state of California that receive state funded yearly $100,000 grants to combat the problem of binge drinking.

In 2004 alone, UCSB had two faculty members win the Nobel Prize, one for Economics and the other for Physics. That puts the schools total at 5 Noble Prize winners since 1998.

They now average around 50 million in private donations, great for a school that was once considered simply a party school. They are headed in the right academic direction, if only they could be making such strides in the extracurricular and societal matters.

The reason I disagreed with the police about alcohol being the cause of the crime in the city was based on research the Daily Nexus did.

The paper came up with crime statistics over years since the grants were given. What it showed was that most of the money went to providing money for extra police during the Halloween weekend.

One weekend out of 52.

Most of that money went to pay the cops for overtime. Seriously?

While Isla Vista crime dropped over the Halloween weekend, arrests went up. Mostly the drunk in public variety, a victimless crime, but others rose as well. However, serious crimes have risen over the rest of the year in direct disregard for the money that is being spent to protect the people.

Crimes like rape, assault and battery, burglary and grand theft have risen over those years. My untested hypothesis is that because IV is run by the Sheriffs and is not a sovereign police force, the lack of funding and actual detective work has contributed to the rise in serious crimes.

Because the police concentrated on binge drinking, they really narrow the scope to which they see crime. They are trained to look for different things, they assume things, and they really don’t respect people rights. You could say that for most cops, especially with the reputation Los Angeles has, but most students are not criminals.

The IV Foot Patrol really needs to understand why the students hate them so much. The hate has to come from somewhere. Almost everyone has a story that happened to them or someone they know where a cop treated someone unfairly.

It just happens, and most of that fault is on the students, because they love to bitch and complain but are too damn lazy to mobilize and create a watchdog organization to police the cops.

It is the cops taking advantage of the indifference of the student population that bothers me.

It needs to change. Or students need to accept it and stop the whining.

On the cliffs of UCSB in the Spring 06. I really miss that place.

This photo was made possible by Terence, the letter J and ideas.

I went to a star gazing party a while back. It was cool, there were many different kinds of telescopes set up at different objects; like stars, galaxies, the moon and Saturn. It was one of the coldest nights I can remember, because it snowed the next day in the mountains to the north Santa Barbara.

That was nuts. Snow in Santa Barbara? It happened, I was there.

I had never seen anythings through a telescope before, I felt like a little kid seeing things for the first time. I had a great time.

That tower in the photo was an old Monastery that was sold to a school. They light it up from the inside at night.